I used to have a blog of my own to put these entries, but when I realized it takes me a forever to make an entry (I started this one on October 26th) I felt defeated and shut down the blog. But here's a taste of what might have been if I kept it going:
...And Our Mascot is an Egret: A Nick Hornby Ripoff in Five Parts
Whatever comes before the prologue (or) Remember when they did this gag at the beginning of episodes of "Rocky & Bullwinkle?"
Every once in a while, I'll come across a certain item in my life that just seems to be connected to me in a seemingly random set of ways. Sometimes it's a person who has a lot of mutual friends/connections, sometimes it's finding out that two films I loved as a child were connected by their creators. In the past ten to fifteen years, I've noticed quite a bit of these odd connections with bands. Usually it's because I've tended to stick with certain labels/regions/scenes for extended periods of time. I think I bought my first release on K records about 12 years ago. Since then, I haven't ever stopped paying attention to their current and back catalogs.
In the past year or so, however, I've recently come back around on some music that I hadn't thought about in years and I'm making connections between bands and labels which I thought were not connected in any significant way. Since the whole nature of this post is about roundabout connections, I'll start my story on a completely unrelated tangent. That tangent is mid-90's twee-electronic act Land of the Loops. But to get to that point, I first have to talk about Kurt Cobain and Lollapalooza:
Prologue: Passing the torch of fandom to a generation too young to be trusted with anything flammable
The summer of 1995 changed my life. That year, the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, my dad took me to Lollapalooza. Over the course of '93-'94 a friend had gotten me big into Nirvana. Anyone big into Nirvana at that time knew that Kurt Cobain glew with an aura of positive PR for his favorite bands, a glow that only intensified upon news his suicide. After Cobain's death, it became difficult as a 14 year old to listen to Nirvana records. Death is just not an issue a 14 year old boy wants to deal with. So what did we do? We scoured interviews, magazine articles, noted cover songs during radio-broadcasted Nirvana concerts. We learned what Cobain's favorite bands were and made them our favorite bands. My friend at the time sided with Mudhoney, I with Sonic Youth. My pilgrimage to the altera-rock festival a mere 15 months after Cobain's demise was by no means a luxury, it was my duty. By that time, a pretty significant portion of my CD shelf was filled with Sonic Youth discs. It was quite the feat, especially for someone who had no tangible income and financially struggling parents. The jury is still out as to whether I shoplifted any of the discs. If I did, I honestly don't remember, but I wouldn't put it past my teenage self. The act of obtaining these discs was obviously really tough for someone that young, especially in the pre-internet suburbs. This was why that when attending the Lollapalooza festival, I was just as excited to get a stack of CD catalogs as I was to see a bunch of my favorite bands.
For about the next year and a half, I only really existed between the pages of these catalogs. I'd estimate that 75% of the page space was taken up by t-shirts. Seeing the Pavement "Sunny Side Up" and "Pavement Ist Rad" shirts in so many catalogs probably did more to get me to the record store the day of Brighten the Corners' release than actually seeing the band at Lollapalooza. Each of these catalogs had a small area in the back dedicated to selling CDs, CDs that I never saw in the record stores I frequented. And they sold vinyl records, too.
Chapter 1: Multi-family mailorder (or) Singles for singles (couples dance only)
Most of my early time spent with these catalogs was mere window shopping. I knew that these periodicals were a gateway to something exciting, something alien to my entire current set of family and peers. Unfortunately, I had no means to meet the end of a significant order. I eventually took on a job as a paperboy, delivering a weekly free paper that no one ever wanted. I delivered papers on Wednesday evenings, a process that took about four hours, but only paid fourteen dollars every two weeks. But this was my mailorder money. My parents encouraged me to get my own checking account, so they wouldn't have to cash the checks themselves. My allowance at the time was just about the exact same amount (our system was fifty cents per week for every year old you were, hence $7/week in 1995), but that money was always spent before I even got it, it's a small amount to compete with what was becoming an ever-increasing standard for commercial goods within my circle of friends.
The paper route money was untouchable, though. It rarely was converted to cash, I just kept it in the account for purposes such as my first few mailorder purchases. I believe my first attempt were some budget-priced discs out of the back of a less than savory looking catalog. When I got the discs I realized the CDs I had were probably bootlegs made in some unidentified country in Asia, hence all the writing on them that I didn't understand. The one disc that stands out from this order was L7's Bricks Are Heavy, mostly because I was already familiar with the placement of the infamous Tipper Gore stamp on the front, which was oddly replaced with a black box and some catalog number on my copy.
Regardless of my less than stellar first order results, I soldiered on. A few months into the catalog game, I made my most successful mailorder purchase. It was directly from Sub Pop, the infamous seattle label who originally signed Nirvana. By this time it was either very late in 1995, or already the spring or so of '96 (aahhh, some of these release dates are revealing that it was definitely early '96). The first highlight of the order was my Sub Pop "Winner" T-Shirt: A short-lived variation on the now ubiquitous (ok, probably then, too) "Loser" shirt. That one was black with white print, this one was a horrendous orange with even more cringe-inducing purple print. I think I wore this shirt roughly 36 hours a week until it fell apart sometime in 1999. I also got a free CD compilation from the order called Spring Lineup that was my holy grail when it came to the then-current Sub Pop roster for the remainder of the year. I also ordered a stack of 7" singles, because 1) They were cheap and 2) I had just obtained a rickety old turntable. The most notable of these singles was Land of the Loops' "Multi-Family Garage Sale."2 I wasn't really into any sort of electronic music at the time, and even this, in retrospect, is just sample based indie pop. But at the time, it just blew me away. To this day, I still really love that song. That single is the only thing left from that order that I still own.
Chapter 2: I've never been wrong, I used to work in the record store
American suburbs in 1996 were brewing in anticipation, we were on the cusp of a new millenium. As each household got their first internet-ready PC, households began to experience a revolution first-hand, from the dark dusty corners of their family rooms where the fish tank used to be. My reading material switched from dog-eared catalogs to sketchy newsgroups and lo-fi fanpages. My tastes stagnated for a while, until I got a job in a record store in early 1998. At that point, I branched out from my favorite bands to their side projects, labelmates, bands who supported them on tour, and any other possible connection. I picked up a few more Land of The Loops releases and even made a homemade t-shirt by scanning album art and using inkjet iron-on transfers.
This paragraph is right around the time where I actually get to the topic that I had originally intended to write about. I found out that Land of the Loops started out on a small northwestern label called Slabco, run by Steven Nereo, longtime friend of LOTL's Alan Sutherland. I quickly submersed myself in Slabco's catalog, which was very similar in approach to what I was doing in music at the time... simply documenting my own musical adventures and those of my close friends. Slabco admittedly was a lot more successful and had a lot higher quality output. I really got into Steven's own project called Volume All*Star, which was essentially an ever so slightly more twee version of Land of the Loops.3
Meanwhile, I was also branching off into experimental electronic music. Being a record store employee in 1998 meant that you inevitably heard a ton of Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and a bunch of other catalog items from little holier-than-thou labels across the pond. This music had a huge impact on me, especially my own musical ventures. The catalogs of british labels Warp and Rephlex were either too expensive or too overplayed for me to spend a lot of time on them, so I quickly went to their American counterparts. At the time, this American experimental electronic scene was on the cusp of completely blowing up, but with no labels to release their music on. Some early adopters like Kid606 and Matmos affiliated themselves with noise labels such as Vinyl Communications.6 Kid606 and co-conspirator Cex ended up aligning themselves with Boyracer's Steward, who ran the 555 label, which mostly just put out 7"s by mostly indie pop bands, but Steward was in the same boat as me in the late 90's, he loved the new sounds coming out of laptops.4
Even meanwhile, I picked up a copy of Short Poppy Syndrome by The Cannanes out of a used bin at work and gave it a couple of spins.5 Something about my late 90's mind couldn't get past the shoddy looking packaging to actually hear the really solid pop goodness on the disc, I don't think it stayed on my shelf for more than a couple of weeks. At the time, little did I know that an album cover by an art student did not make for a great album.
So this is where all these divergent loose ends end up in the middle of a rubber band ball in my head. Sometime in 2000, Boyracer's Steward collaborated on an album with The Cannanes. The resulting album was called Communicating at an Unkown Rate and it's great, especially if you have a sense of history of the collaborators, who both were about a decade into their respective projects and thriving more than ever at the time. All I knew at the time was that "Savage," the final track on the album, was a complete jam, but I didn't really 'get' the rest of the album.7 I think this was largely due to the Cannanes album that followed in 2002... a collaboration with Slabco recording artist Explosion Robinson. The album was chock full of lo-fi hip-hop beats, the likes of which at that point had been abandoned by the mainstream rappers roughly seven years previous. The album eschewed a lot of what The Cannanes were supposed to be, and made them into a cookie-cutter Slabco band. For some reason this amused me more than any of their previous work.
Chapter 3: The digital age and the damage still being done
My record collection hates me for what I did to it between the years of 2003 and 2005. It was a rough time in my life... I was fired from the record store. I spent the next three months unemployed. I got a job I hated and had to work there for five months. I had to move back in with my parents because I had no money. I attended my first four funerals in the span of two years. My personal relationships were strained, severed, and left in random dark places to rot. Most tragically of all, I had to sell of several hundred CDs to make ends meet. All in all, it was just a really sucky time.
Somehow, I managed to bounce back from this dark time pretty quickly. I got a decent job. I got my finances in order. Unhealthy relationships were replaced with thriving new ones. I was back on my feet in every sense possible, but the large portion of my record collection that I sold off to pay bills wasn't going to come back by just having a positive outlook. (yeah, I'm definitely calling out anyone who believes in that "The Secret" bull****. Have it out by emailing me at TimothyScottThornton@gmail.com)
A couple of the casualties of this huge 2-year CD sell-off were my two remaining Cannanes albums. They really weren't missed until I made a revelation. In my collecting of all things from the 1990's northwest indie scene, I had picked up a compilation called Projector, put out by Pat Maley's Yoyo label, which is credited for putting on some legendary concert festivals in Olympia, WA in the 90's, or so I'm told. He's also a hero for the home recording crowd, recording a lot of bands' albums in his studio for free in exchange for them recording an exclusive track for one of his compilations. This particular compilation included a perfect pop song. All hyperbole aside, if I were going to make a desert island compilation of songs I would consider to be perfect pop songs, this one would be track 1. The track is by a band called Ashtray Boy, it's called "Koala Boy."1 It's an extremely silly, cheeky song, but it just works on every level. I've included it on countless mixes and playlists in the past decade, but never thought to research the band. A recent trip to Columbus' Used Kids Records had me looking at an Ashtray Boy album in their budget bin. It was called Macho Champions, and it has probably the worst cover art of all time (posted here for your perusal). I bought the album, it's ok. I think when you hear what you consider to be a perfect song by a band, it's hard for that band to live up to your expectations. But interestingly enough, the purchase of this album inspired me to do some research on the band. There were two versions of the band, one in Australia and one in Chicago (Macho Champions is by the American version of the band, natch). Both bands are led by a man named Randall Lee, who (drumroll please) was a member of The Cannanes.So the story ends back in Columbus just a couple days before I started writing this post. I finally tracked down a copy of The Cannanes & Steward's Communicating at an Unknown Rate for $5 at the ever reliable Used Kids and re-bought it, just like the dozens of other records I've gotten rid of and regretted. It's way better this time around, as is Short Poppy Syndrome that I bought on the same trip (along with their debut full-length Caveat Emptor and a handful of 7" singles, yeah I've got issues). Please don't let me sell them off.
I guess that's the end of the story, or at least where it ends for now, as it has taken me from 1995 to the present. The odd thing is that this is just one of several streams of consciousness that lead me from then to now, I could probably write a book with all the different ways, but alas, I'd never finish it.
Footnotes: A Companion Mix
1. Ashtray Boy - "Koala Boy" (Appears on: Projector: Another Studio Compilation - Yoyo Recordings, 1999)
2. Land of the Loops - "Multi-family Garage Sale (Bargain-bin Mix)" (Appears on: Land of the Loops - Bundle of Joy - Up Records, 1996)
3. Voume All*Star - "Alpoboy" (Appears on: Volume All*Star - Close Encounters with the Bump and Grind - Slabco Records. 1997)
4. Cex - Get In Yr Squads (Appears on: Cex - Starship Galactica EP - 555 Recordings of Philadelphia, 2001)
5. The Cannanes - Sydney 2000 (Appears on: The Cannanes - Short Poppy Syndrome - Ajax, 1995)
6. Kid606 - Matmos Are The A-Team Of Electronica (Appears on: Kid606 - Don't Sweat the Technics - Vinyl Communications, 1998)
7. The Cannanes & Steward - Savage (Appears on: The Cannaes & Steward - Communicating at an Unknown Rate - Yoyo Recordings, 2000)
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Download Link 2 (In case the first one doesn't work for you)
